I tried doing a quick search, but couldn't find it. Need to go eat some breakfast.

And I'm sorry to hear about the still rising numbers of the dead and missing. My thoughts have been going out to one of our members who was in the chat a day or two ago who is a native Japanese living here in the US, but whose family in Japan is still missing.

It seems that they only keep a certain number of news items active and the older ones drop off.

If you go to this page, 福島県のニュース, the oldest story currently displayed, it may change by time you go there, has a file name of 6054749311.html which would suggest that it was created some time after 6054748231.html.

Edit: Actually the news items on that page are in random order and there is at least one older news item.

Last edited by chikara on Thu 03.17.2011 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Don't complain to me that people kick you when you're down. It's your own fault for lying there

[b]KATSUNOBU SAKURAI (translated): We weren't told when the first reactor exploded. We only heard about it on TV. The government doesn't tell us anything. We're isolated. They're leaving us to die.[/b]

But then, if you are that concerned, you should continue to read news reporting the great effort from the Japanese government, international aids and supports and all the people in Japan. I don't think anyone is sitting around doing nothing.

[b]KATSUNOBU SAKURAI (translated): We weren't told when the first reactor exploded. We only heard about it on TV. The government doesn't tell us anything. We're isolated. They're leaving us to die.[/b]

But then, if you are that concerned, you should continue to read news reporting the great effort from the Japanese government, international aids and supports and all the people in Japan. I don't think anyone is sitting around doing nothing.

Yes I do, the 1st thing I do when I woke up is the read the news, so I do see updates too, now I'm going to stick with NHK news too.

I read somewhere, where the family members sending message to their love one who is fighting at the nuclear plant, really touching, and showing the spirits.

Quick news update. According to NHK the number of confirmed casualties is now 6911 with 10754 people missing. Furthermore they mention that this is the worst disaster to have hit Japan since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in world war 2, even worse than the great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 which claimed 6434 lives.

I stopped off at MOS Burger for a couple of chili dogs this evening and since I was alone I picked up the Yomiuri for today (19th) and read the articles on the inside back page. Disheartening and depressing news, indeed.

The largest article interviewed a rescue team from Kobe the members of which had experience from the '95 quake there. They said in terms of rescue and body recovery efforts the two don't even compare. In Kobe about 80% of people died from being crushed or something else related to having a building fall on them. Finding the bodies wasn't a problem; they just looked inside the rubble. This time about 90% of the people drowned and most suffered multiple post-mortem broken bones, likely as a result of being smashed by debris. The force of the water is likened to being run over by a four ton truck going 40kph, with a force of about 50 tons per square meter. Identification of the bodies is proving extremely difficult, with only about 3% having been identified in one prefecture and 6% in another. Fuel shortages and destroyed roads are making it almost impossible for survivors to come identify bodies. Police are posting descriptions of clothing and items carried in the hopes it will ring a bell with someone. They're also taking fingerprints, dental photos, and DNA samples. Fingerprints will be useless in most cases, as so few people have any on file anywhere to compare them against. Dental photos will be of limited use, as matching up thousands of photos of people whom no one has the slightest idea who they are would necessitate going through all records (at least of the same gender and approximate age). And it also depends on the records having survived the tsunami. I suspect that in most cases it is going to come down to DNA matching.

Many of the bodies, especially of the elderly, are said to have been found wearing multiple layers of clothes and carrying things such as their inkan, bank books, insurance card, photo albums. Many were also found with backpacks containing their emergency evacuation packs from their homes. Based on this it is speculated that it wasn't a case of people failing to try to get away but there just simply not having been enough time between the warning and the tsunami striking to reach a safe area.

The rescuers say that digging through rubble and muck is turning up neither survivors nor victims and they suspect that most of the missing were swept out to sea. The group related a story of being asked to search for a woman in her 70s last known to be on the second floor of her home. When they finally figured out where the home had been they then had to start the search for where it is now. They found it about 800 meters away, but there was no sign of the woman. This sort of thing is complicating identification of victims, as the location where a body was found offers no clue for narrowing down the possibilities of who the person may have been.

A hospital in Fukushima upon receipt of evacuation orders just went off and abandoned 98 bed-ridden patients (out of 300 total patients). They were subsequently found by Self-Defense Force personnel.

I heard on NHK Radio a report of a hospital with a normal staff of about 190 which was down to a mere 17 left who hadn't fled the coop and abandoned their bed-ridden patients. They're having trouble working up materials on the patients to send along with them when they finally get transported to a hospital in a safer location....because their doctors evacuated and abandoned them.

On Tuesday I heard an interview with a man who had made his way down from a town where there were about 700 people taking shelter with no food, no water, no fuel, and an extreme shortage of blankets. Three days after the quake and they had yet to have any contact whatsoever with any rescue group or government agency. Yesterday I heard a report of a place that after one week had just received medicine for the first time. And I also heard that most of the disaster relief medical teams that came from areas around Japan had left the area and gone back home already.

Reports of the number of missing which are on the low end should be taken with a bucket of salt. Those numbers are based on missing person reports having been filed. When entire families/communities have been wiped out, you have to expect a certain number of cases where there is no surviving relative left to file a report. The higher numbers are probably based on population numbers minus confirmed survivors and the number of bodies found in a town. Just because a body ends up in one town doesn't mean it started there, though.

I just get sick of seeing remarks from people outside Japan expressing admiration for the wonderful disaster preparedness in Japan. Those of us who have lived here for a while and have seen the response to a number of disasters know that it is a total fuster cluck each and every time, with lessons poorly learned and poorly implemented from previous experiences. The government and media do a great job of making things look great each time, at least right at first. And we all know that right at first is about the only time anybody overseas is paying any attention to the details anyway. So I guess it is to be expected that the undeserved reputation for outstanding disaster preparedness persists.

This is slightly edited for space, but I left the language (including the naughty words) intact as it really seems to suit the sense of "holy crap"-ness. The full source is here. It's from "Badass of the Week," and I present to you Akaiwa Hideaki.

On the afternoon of Friday, March 11th, Hideaki Akaiwa was at his job, dully trudging out the final bitter minutes of his work week in his office just outside the port city of Ishinomaki in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. What this guy's day job actually is, I honestly have no idea, but based on the extremely limited information I have on the guy I can only presume that his daily nine-to-five routine probably falls somewhere between the motorcycle chase scenes from the movie Akira and John Rambo's antics in the book version of First Blood on the ridiculousness/badassitude scale. But that's only speculation.

The one thing we know for certain is that Akaiwa was at work on the 11th, when suddenly, right as he was in the middle of jumping over a giant Gatling-gun-armed robot while riding on a rocket-powered jetbike he'd MacGuyvered together out of vines, tree branches, and a couple thumbtacks, something terrible happened -- an earthquake. And not just any earthquake -- a mega fucking brain-busting insane earthquake the likes of which the island of Japan had never had the misfortune of experiencing before. The ground shook, buildings crumbled, lights smashed apart, and the entire population of the country froze in fear as fault line below Japan rumbled for a ridiculous two-plus minutes.

But, amazingly, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake wasn't the worst thing to happen to the town Ishinomaki on that horrible day. No, that was afterwards, when the tremors from the earthquake churned up a raging tsunami that took a bustling city of 162,000 people and suddenly turned it into little more than a ten-foot-deep lake.

...

Needless to say, poor Hideaki Akaiwa, concerned for his family, rushed out of his office in time to see his city completely submerged under an obscene ten feet of water that buried everything from houses to businesses. He ran to the high water mark and stared helplessly into the sprawling lake that once used to be his home.

But it gets even worse. Hideaki's wife of twenty years was still buried inside the lake somewhere. She hadn't gotten out. She wasn't answering her phone. The water was still rising, the sun was setting, cars and shit were swooshing past on a river of sea water, and and rescue workers told him there was nothing that could be done -- the only thing left was to sit back, wait for the military to arrive, and hope that they can get in there and rescue the survivors before it's too late. With 10,000 citizens of Ishinomaki still missing and unaccounted for, the odds weren't great that Hideaki would ever see his wife again.

For most of us regular folks, this is the sort of shit that would make us throw up our hands, swear loudly, and resign ourselves to a lifetime of hopeless misery.

But Hideaki Akaiwa isn't a regular guy. He's a fucking insane badass, and he wasn't going to sit back and just let his wife die alone, freezing to death in a miserable water-filled tomb. He was going after her. No matter what.

How the fuck Hideaki Akaiwa got a hold of a wetsuit and a set of SCUBA gear is one of the great mysteries of the world. I'm roughly twenty hours into Fallout 3 and I'm lucky to come across a fucking vacuum cleaner in that godforsaken post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet this guy is in the middle of a real-life earth-shaking mecha-disaster and he's coming up with oxygen tanks, waterproof suits, and rebreather systems seemingly out of thin air. I guess when you're a truly unstoppable badass, you, by definition, don't let anything stand in your way. You make shit happen, all the time, no matter what.

Regardless of how he came across this equipment (borrowing, stealing, buying, beating up a Yakuza SCUBA diving demolitions expert, etc.) Hideaki threw on his underwater survival gear, rushed into the God damned tsunami, and dove beneath the rushing waves, determined to rescue his wife or die trying. ... He dove down into the water, completely submerged in the freezing cold, pitch black rushing current on all sides, and started swimming through the underwater ruins of his former hometown.

Surrounded by incredible hazards on all sides, ranging from obscene currents capable of dislodging houses from their moorings, sharp twisted metal that could easily have punctured his oxygen line (at best) or impaled him (at worst), and with giant fucking cars careening through the water like toys, he pressed on. Past broken glass, past destroyed houses, past downed power lines arcing with electrical current, through undertow that could have dragged him out to sea never to be heard from again, he searched.

Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.

But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn't done yet.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering what the fuck is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no shit, it gets even better. You see, Hideaki's mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going.

First, Hideaki searched around the evacuation shelters and other areas, looking for his mom among the ragtag groups of survivors who had been lucky enough to flee to higher ground. She might have escaped, and he needed to find her. Now. He ran through the city like some post-apocalyptic action hero, desperately trying to track her down, but when a couple of days went by without any sign of her, he knew what he had to do. The water had only receded a few inches by this point, the rescue teams weren't working quickly enough for his tastes, and Hideaki Akaiwa fucking once again took matters into his own hands -- rushing back into the waterlogged city looking for his mom.

So, once again Hideaki navigated his way through the Atlantean city, picking his way through crumbling wreckage, splintered wood, and shredded metal to find his elderly mother. After another grueling trek, he tracked her down on the upper levels of a house -- she'd been stranded there for four days, and would almost certainly have died without the timely aid of her son. He brought her to safety somehow as well, as you might expect at this point.

Now, while most people would have been content in the knowledge that their family was safe, Hideaki Akaiwa isn't the sort of badass who's going to hang up his flippers and quit just because he'd taken care of his own personal shit -- this guy made an oath to keep going back into the wreckage on his own to find people and help them to safety. Today this 43-year-old Japanese badass rides out every single day, multiple times a day, riding around on a bicycle with his legs wrapped in plastic to keep himself dry. His only equipment -- a pocketknife, a canteen, a flashlight, a change of clothes, and a badass set of aviator sunglasses -- packed into a trusty trio of backpacks, he rides out in search of people needing rescue, a modern-day, real-life action hero.

One thing I'm sure of: his scuba suit didn't need a weight belt. His big old brass ones would have suited the purpose.